EDITORIAL: Reserve Bank rehash shows the ANC’s intellectual vacuum

New year, newly elected leader, same prehistoric ideas. If President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC’s ideas on fixing the country sound weary, populist, outdated and uninspired, it’s because they are. 

This week, as news “broke” of how the ANC wanted to broaden the Reserve Bank’s mandate and launch a state bank, it sounded like 2017 all over again (or 2012, or 2007). 

You can see this one of two ways. First, it’s encouraging that room-temperature IQ ideas like these are never truly implemented. But the second, more dispiriting, way to see it is that it lays bare the wasteland that passes for new ideas in the governing party.  

This, in itself, gives the lie to Ramaphosa’s vow of “reform” and “transformation”: without new ideas, the ANC is doomed to a death spiral of rehashed and hackneyed ideologically shackled promises, which weren't practical enough to be implemented the first time around. 

In its economic policy plans, released in December, the ANC resolves that the Bank should implement monetary policy in a fair and balanced way, taking into account growth, employment and the exchange rate.

Gwede Mantashe, the ANC’s national chair, says the mandate must be broadened to “meet the needs of the economy”, and the party’s economic transformation head, Mmamoloko Kubayi, says a constitutional amendment is required to do this.

Yet Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago has consistently said the mandate is constitutionally enshrined to control inflation, and bolstering “economic growth” and “creating jobs” does not fall into this.

Predictably, the news wasn’t well received by the markets, and the rand lost ground, considering the Bank is seen as one of the few institutional strengths in a sea of ANC-led incompetence and malpractice.

But investors needn’t panic that any of this will actually happen. You’d get better odds on Fikile Mbalula going into the priesthood. 

Ramaphosa himself pretty much said as much when, speaking to the media, he said: “It’s not something that’s about to happen, it’s something that’s being debated.”

Like so many other daft ideas.

The fact is, the argument around the Bank’s mandate is not new. If anything, this 2022 ANC resolution is diluted from the one in 2017, which resolved that the Bank should be wholly owned by the state.

The ANC is also unlikely to get the two-thirds majority in parliament to make the amendment, anyway. So all this Bank red herring has done is, unintentionally, underscore the ANC’s pathological dearth of genuinely creative and worthwhile ideas. Instead, its instinct is to reach for populist gimmicks to address the country’s economic frailty, rather than addressing its own governance weaknesses. 

To be fair, there was one striking new idea among the ANC’s economic transformation resolutions, and it was a tear-jerker. It was an entire resolution adopted on … electric vehicles. 

The ANC noted: “The transition in the automotive sector will entail the shift from manufacturing of internal combustion engine cars to other alternatives such as battery-electric vehicles and fuel cell-electric vehicles.” 

It resolved that “there must be preparations for the rollout of electric vehicles immediately, and the impact on households and various sectors must be established”.

Well, yes. It sounds as mythical as its resolutions on the much-vaunted “fourth industrial revolution”, punted at a time that most households can’t even boil a kettle for many hours in a day because there just isn’t the power.

Just like fiddling with the Bank mandate, the ANC wants to eat an elephant when it can barely catch a mouse.